SUVs on Mars

Yet even with this apparently abysmal response rate of less than 0.00001%, the researchers still estimate that the controllers of a network the size of Storm are still bringing in about $7,000 a day or $3.5 million per year.

Oklahoma’s largest ambulance company will become the first ambulance service in the nation to outfit its entire fleet with new Howler sirens, designed to emit low-frequency tones that penetrate objects within 200 feet — such as cars — to alert drivers.

From Google’s Page:
We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

After a series of several surprisingly healthy quarters, the soft economy may have finally caught up with Intel. The chipmaker has trimmed its revenue forecast by $1.1 billion, and it now expects gross margin to be around four points below the previously announced figure.

Focusing on content submitted and popularized on popular social sites Digg.com and Google’s YouTube, two researches have concocted not one but three ways to predict how much traffic and overall user interaction a story or submitted video will receive well after it hits its initial popularity.

NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has ceased communications after operating for more than five months. As anticipated, seasonal decline in sunshine at the robot’s arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander’s instruments.

Next year, NASA is slated to launch an SUV-size rover on a trip to Mars. With an estimated budget of $2 billion, the Mars Science Laboratory will carry three different kinds of cameras, as well as chemistry instruments, environmental sensors and radiation monitors. According to NASA, all of those instruments are designed to help scientists continue to figure out whether life ever existed on Mars and to prepare to send humans to the Red Planet.

A U.S. based Web hosting firm that security experts say was responsible for facilitating more than 75 percent of the junk e-mail blasted out each day globally has been knocked offline following reports from [Security Fix|http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/] on evidence gathered about suspicious activity emanating from the network.

[New Scientist|http://www.newscientist.com/] reports that a team in the US has brought the world one step closer to cheap, mass-produced, perfect diamonds. The improvement also means there is no theoretical limit on the size of diamonds that can be grown in the lab.